On AJR

Martha Himmelfarb takes a retrospective look at her own extensive research in ancient Jewish apocalypse

Himmelfarb: "Thus I no longer see the ascent apocalypses as an unbroken tradition emanating from the Book of the Watchers as I did in Ascent to Heaven. I would now suggest that we need to pay careful attention to the distinct historical moments at which ascent apocalypses were written, not only the moment at the end of the third century in which the Book of the Watchers was composed, but also the Parables’ reworking of the Book of the Watchers, still in a single-heaven format, in the service of a more intense collective eschatology sometime on either side of the turn of the era, and the composition in the early centuries of this era by both Jews and Christians of ascents through seven heavens, apparently unrelated to the Parables’ picture."

Book Note: Khodadad Rezakhani, Reorienting the Sasanians: Eastern Iran in Late Antiquity (Edinburgh University Press, 2017)

Gross: "Rezakhani notes that this region has suffered from the confluence of a few trends. First, the Sasanian Empire has been conceptualized as a Western leaning Empire, mostly invested in Iraq and Khuzistan, less of a reflection of the actual history of the empire than the western-centrism of scholars. Second, as a result of the lack of Sasanian or more local contemporary historical or literary works concerning East Iran, the various barriers to accessing this material and the general disinterest in this area by related fields, most of the studies that have appeared are philologically focused, and do not attempt to provide a larger historical narrative of this region. Rezakhani therefore sets out to fill this desiderata by providing a narrative history of East Iran."